1728

Publication of Pierre Fauchard’s two-volume L Chirugien-dentiste, ou Traité des Dents (The Dental Surgeon, or, Treatise on the Teeth), the first scientific approach to dental care. Its view of tooth transplants was in contradistinction to the traditional tooth drawers for whom tooth decay resulted from tooth worms. In addition, Fauchard “invented the ideas and tools for filling teeth, filing them and applying braces to straighten them. . . . This new kind of specialist surgeon he called a dentiste stuck . . . making its way into English as ‘dentist’ twenty years or so later” (Chaddock, 119-121, quoted at 119). In the 1760s, after extensive experiments transplanting cockerels’ spurs to their heads, a cockerel testicle to a hen’s belly, and a human tooth to a cockerel’s comb, John Hunter began transplanting teeth “donated” by poor children to wealthy recipients. He believed the transplants worked “because of a vital principle’ establishing a connection with the new part, bringing it back to life. Like the Boerhaavian vitalists who came before him, he believed life was a physical thing, an invisible particle that couldn’t be seen or even detected by scientific instruments” (Craddock, 153-155). During the mid-18th century, the desire for clean teeth, a nice smelling mouth, and a nice smile was fueled by “a widening class system and consumer revolution in a culture that increasingly defined people by what they looked like and what they owned. This was the shift that dentistry in general, and the tooth transplant in particular, needed in order to become popular” (147). In England, popularity of tooth transplants peaked in 1770s and 80s, and thereupon declined, as dentists realized they didn’t work most of the time, with recipients contracting syphilis and occasionally dying. The naked elitism of the procedure, especially the cruelty to poor children selling their healthy teeth to the wealthy (especially the new money) for a small payment, became increasingly offensive (Chaddock, 161). Even “Hunter himself, who had clearly since been shaken by the savagery he’d helped unleash,” urged his former pupil William Rae to “talk about the immorality of the operation.” In 1803, Joseph Fox, another Hunter pupil, wrote that the operation involved “’a defect of the moral principle as one person is injured and disfigured in order to contribute to the luxury and convenience of another’” (164-165).